Hebrew Language - Jewish Languages - Ladino
Ladino is a Romance language, derived
mainly from Old Castilian (Spanish) and Hebrew. Speakers are currently
almost exclusively Sephardic Jews, although historically there have also
been Ashkenazi speakers — for example, in Thessaloniki and Istanbul.
Name of language
The language is also called Judæo-Spanish, Sefardi, Dzhudezmo, Judezmo,
and Spanyol; Haquitía (from the Arabic haka حكى, "tell") refers to the
dialect of North Africa, especially Morocco. The dialect of the Oran
area of Algeria was called Tetuani or Tetauni, after the Moroccan town
Tétouan, since many Oranais Jews came from this city. In Hebrew, the
language is called Spanyolit.
According to the Ethnologue,
The name 'Dzhudezmo' is used by Jewish linguists, 'Judeo-Espanyol' by
Turkish Jews; 'Judeo-Spanish' by Romance philologists; 'Ladino' by
laymen, especially in Israel; 'Hakitia' by Moroccan Jews; 'Spanyol' by
some others.
Sometimes "Ladino" is reserved for a very Hebraicized form used in
religious translations as in the Ferrara Bible.
Like Old Spanish, Ladino keeps the [ʃ] and [ʒ] palatal phonemes, both
changed to [x] in modern Spanish. But unlike Old Spanish, it has an [x]
phoneme taken over from Hebrew. It has also developed certain
characteristic usages, such as muestro for nuestro (our). The structure
is linguistically related to Spanish, with the addition of many terms
from the Hebrew, Portuguese, French, Turkish, Greek, and South Slavic
languages depending on where the speakers resided.
Orthography
Today, Ladino is most commonly written with the Latin alphabet,
especially in Turkey. However, it is still sometimes written in the
Hebrew alphabet (especially in Rashi characters), a practice that was
very common, possibly almost universal, until the 19th Century (and
called aljamiado, by analogy with Arabic usage.) Although the Greek and
Cyrillic alphabets have been employed in the past, this is rare
nowadays. Following the decimation of Sephardic communities throughout
much of Europe (particularly in the Netherlands and the Balkans) during
the Second World War, the greatest proportion of speakers remaining were
Turkish Jews. As a result the Turkish variant of the Latin alphabet is
widely used for publications in Ladino. The Israeli Autoridad Nasionala
del Ladino promotes another spelling. There are also those who, with
Iacob M Hassán, claim that Ladino should adopt the orthography of the
standard Spanish language.
History
During the Middle Ages, Jews were instrumental in the development of
Castilian into a prestige language. In the Toledo School of Translators,
erudite Jews translated Arabic and Hebrew works (often translated
earlier from Greek) into Castilian and Christians translated again into
Latin for transmission to Europe.
Until recent times, the language was widely spoken throughout the
Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa, having been brought
there by Jewish refugees fleeing Spain following the expulsion of the
Jews in 1492. The contact among Jews of different regions and tongues
developed a unified dialect, already different in some aspects of the
Castilian norm that was forming simultaneously in Spain. Ladino was the
most used language in Thessaloniki, Greece until after World War I, and
remained widespread there until the death of 49,000 Thessalonikan Greek
Jews in the Holocaust during the Second World War. Over time, a corpus
of literature, both liturgical and secular, developed.
Early Ladino literature was limited to translations from Hebrew. At the
end of the 17th century, Hebrew was disappearing as the vehicle for
Rabbinic instruction. Thus a literature in the popular tongue (Ladino)
appeared in the 18th century, such as Meam Loez and poetry collections.
By the end of the 19th century, Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire studied
in schools of the Alliance Israelite Universelle. French became the
language for foreign relations (as it did for Maronites), and Ladino
drew from French for neologisms. New secular genres appeared: more than
300 journals, history, theatre, biographies.
Given the relative isolation of many communities, a number of regional
dialects of Ladino appeared, many with only limited mutual
comprehensibility. This is due largely to the adoption of large numbers
of loanwords from the surrounding populations, including, depending on
the location of the community, from Greek, Turkish, Arabic, and, in the
Balkans, Slavic languages, especially Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian.
In the twentieth century, the number of speakers declined sharply:
entire communities were eradicated in the Holocaust, while the remaining
speakers, many of whom migrated to Israel, adopted Hebrew. The
governments of the new nation-state encouraged instruction in the
official language. At the same time, it aroused the interest of
philologists since it conserved language and literature which existed
prior to the standardisation of Spanish.
Many native speakers today are elderly immigrants, who have not
transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren, however it
is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardic communities. In
addition, Sephardic communities in several Latin American countries
still use Ladino.
Folklorists have been collecting romances and other folk songs, some
dating from before the expulsion.
Here is a sample of religious poetry:
Non komo muestro Dio,
Non komo muestro Sinyor,
Non komo muestro Rey,
Non komo muestro Salvador.
It is also sung in Hebrew (Ein k'Eloheynu), although to a different
melody.
Qol Yerushalayim and Radio Nacional de España hold regular radio
broadcasts in Ladino.
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladino_language
Back to Hebrew Language
|
|
